Biography of the Batman: Stories We Tell Ourselves
by larrygoldstein
Summary: A mysterious biographer tracks down clues to Batman's identity by interviewing the Dark Knight's rogues gallery.
1. your own shadow

**I: your own shadow**

Jonathan Crane looked at the idle tarantulas behind the glass of their tank.

"They are bored again, Igor."

It was not an easy task to force a tarantula down someone's throat, he had learned. He would need gloves this time. He didn't like to touch them.

Calling the man Igor was a grim private joke. But in the cloistered universe of Crane's apartment, the man was nobody else but _Igor_, an unwitting lab assistant to Crane's experiments. The man was already cowering, and Crane had not even administered the fear toxin yet.

He dipped the needle of his syringe into a vial of the murky green chemical produced by his ad hoc laboratory. Crane jabbed Igor's arm, pushing in the poison. Every evening's entertainment, from now on.

"I know how you like spiders," he said to Igor.

The man was crying, his body in a perpetual shiver. He didn't try to run; he knew it would just make things worse. A dog, Crane thought. A helpless dog.

"You're _my_ learner now," he said

He would've smiled, if he still could have.

Crane reached into the tank to extract one of the tarantulas.

"There are places even Batman cannot reach," he said, gesturing to his shack of an apartment, cracks running through the walls, the furniture disordered as if there had been a minor earthquake. "Don't I know it."

"I'm sorry, but the experiment requires that I proceed," Crane said.

He split open Igor's mouth with two fingers, as if they were medical tools, and shoved the tarantula inside, and down. He clamped Igor's mouth closed until it was clear his esophagus had served as a functional tunnel.

"Do you feel it?" Crane asked.

The man clawed at his throat, gasping, screaming, new gashes forming over old ones. He clutched Crane's leg, as if it would provide solace. As if there were mercy.

"Fear is intimacy," said the Scarecrow, "Don't you remember?"

* * *

The Biographer looked through the glass wall of Crane's cell in Arkham. If he weren't so preoccupied, he might've felt sick standing so close to such a vile human being.

"I had urges, I don't deny that. But that's where Igor came in," Crane explained. "I poured them all into Igor. I was trying to control myself. Then Batman showed up. Batman who assumes that anyone receiving pain is a victim.

When he took Igor away, what was I to do? I couldn't control myself."

"But by the time of the incident you'd already started your plot to sabotage Gotham's water supply."

Crane stepped closer to the glass. "No. You're confusing the dates."

"The records say—"

"It's my life."

The Biographer glanced at his notes. He decided to move on—this was not why he had come. "Batman was following up on the missing persons case of a Dr. Todd Milgram, according to his statement to the police."

"One day Batman was at my door. 20 years late."

The biographer tried to disguise his distaste beyond a mask of interest. Another sob story.

"He knew nothing," the Scarecrow said, shaking. "Not about Milgram and his experiments on me. I was a lab boy. My parents were friends with Stanley Milgram, and I'd go there after school sometimes. Todd was an assistant researcher, Stanley's cousin. They were short a participant for the famous obedience experiment with teachers and learners. The shocks. Todd had me fill in. He told me they needed one more. Please proceed, he said. And I'd shock and the learner would scream. I wanted to stop. The experiment requires that you continue, he said. I was just a boy. I looked up to him. I started having horrible nightmares, even though I found out afterward that no one was actually hurt. I'd wake up sweating. Todd told me not to tell anyone. It was a horrible time. One day in class there were huge spiders in my backpack. I had a panic attack. He said he'd help me. He hooked me up to all these wires. Later I found out he was just recording, observing. More tests. It went on for a long time. Years later, when the urges started, I came back for him."

The Biographer instinctively checked his watch, but didn't note the time. It was not a matter of minutes or hours; it was an instinctual urgency. He needed answers. "How did you escape Batman when he intruded on your…experiment?"

"He underestimated me, didn't know about the toxin then. It was before my mask. I sprayed him. I had him— I could've killed Batman."

"Why didn't you?"

"It was something he said while he was under the influence of the toxin. You really think you can get me out of here? You think—"

"Yes," the Biographer said impatiently. Finally, what he had been waiting for.

Crane sunk onto his cot.

"I had a knife to his throat, but it wasn't me he was begging. He was apologizing to someone. He said, 'I was just a boy.'"

* * *

GOTHAM HERALD: Well-known lawyer Vincent Vertas resigns from renowned firm Massey, Birnbaum &amp; Johnson, pledges justice for Batman's "victims"

"He called me last week and said he was leaving. Out of nowhere. I don't understand it. Vinny's a great lawyer, but he's just not a political guy," said Larry Birnbaum, one of the firm's partners.

Vertas, reached at his apartment by telephone, was vague about his reasons for leaving. He would only say that "it's time someone gives the Batman a closer look."


	2. zoology

**II: zoology**

"I read your file," the biographer said to the man with the skin-disease. The man — if you could call him that — made the table in between them seem small. He ran his overgrown nails along the table, scraping out peels of wood as though it were clay. The biographer averted his eyes slightly from all the boils, the strange acne, whatever it was, in a way he hoped was imperceptible.

"And maybe I can help you."

The biographer stifled the vomit building in his throat, forced himself to swallow it. The man's skin was flaking off in a minor, delayed avalanche, each previous swell pushing the earlier flakes closer to the biographer. The man spoke.

"I can be…erratic, but it's within my control. I'm not crazy. I don't belong in Arkham."

"It won't be easy. Maybe, Stonegate, maximum security. The warden is an old friend. Still, the other inmates may not like it…"

The biographer coughed away his euphemism, but the man was unruffled.

"How much will it cost me?"

In the deposition to the plea deal he'd read, the biographer had noticed a passage about Killer Croc's days at the Gotham Circus, before the attempted murder that landed him his first stint in jail many years ago, when he was a wrestling champion. Croc seemed to blame a local reporter, according to his testimony, someone he'd trusted who'd turned on him. There was a lengthy and memorable digression about the nature of reptiles, detailing how he'd been outsmarted, his volubility betraying a desperation to not seem unintelligent. He spoke about crocodiles, their tremendously powerful biting force, their tons of pressure, but once they're closed, you can hold the jaws shut with minimal effort.

"It is not a fee that I require," the biographer told the reptile.

* * *

Killer Croc —his stage name— towered over someone calling himself Thor, a drunken caped schlub swinging a hammer, dragging himself through the lowest and most guttural circles of amateur wrestling. He held no great hammer, just one from someone's toolbox. Circus policy dictated that Croc's opponents were allowed weapons to make it a fair fight.

But it was never really fair, Croc told the reporter who came for an interview. He could've snapped their necks whenever he wanted — it was an exercise in restraint. Give 'em a good show. Give 'em what they want. The packed sleazy crowd, night after night. Controlling his anger, letting it out in productive ways, wrestling as therapy. The reporter had seemed greatly interested in this. They went off the record. They had a lot in common, the reporter told him. Both orphans. The reporter actually had just visited his parents' grave, he said.

"I'd like to do a human interest piece," he'd told Croc, the way the man didn't emphasize human putting him at ease.

The fake Thor took a wild swing with his hammer in the center of the sweaty gymnasium, the two of them locked in a cage the size of a jail cell. Like the animal he is, the promoter, Benny, shouted into his loudspeaker.

The green tint had been less prominent then, a green so dilute you might not call it green. Croc actually used makeup to make his face more garish, to slicken up his skin. A creature of the sewer, Benny yelled to the crowd. You're a performer, he told him privately. Croc even fought shirtless, allowing them all to see the scars on his back. From being born in the Jungle, Benny bellowed.

He didn't mind taking shit from the man who'd made him Killer Croc, reframing his abnormality as a super strength, the man who, even if he didn't like being near him, had taken him in. He knew it was just to sell tickets. At least he was away from that horrible aunt who'd taken him in.

"Born in a cage, our creature returns to the cage!"

Nevermind that he'd grown up in a house like everyone else. A house that belonged to his dead mother's sister, and which like other houses, had knives in the kitchen drawer. He even told this to the reporter, who, after a few hours of walking around the western tent, was already the closest thing he'd ever had to a friend. What did friendless Croc know? To him friend was just a word, an abstraction, and this man fit all the criteria. He forgot he was talking to a reporter, forgot even why he was saying these things, just pleased he could.

When Thor's hammer smashed into Croc's neck, he roared.

He looked at Benny, downing a flask, holding up the number two. Two more blows until Croc could let himself go. Until he could turn it around. But even then, he'd have to hold himself back, unable to beat Thor up too badly or else there wouldn't be any more challengers; perhaps the circus wouldn't want him anymore.

"C'mon, you freak," Thor slurred, as he struck his opponent across the ear. It was like hitting a boulder, the blowback vibrating up his arm.

Usually, they were afraid— cruelty generally existed for him outside the ring — inside, fear — fear of him breaking their ribcage — suppressed cruelty.

But this false Thor was laying it on. Croc felt calm though, having just talked about it all with the reporter, having waded through his trauma, finally having a sympathetic listener, inoculated. The reporter had said he'd come and Croc turned to scour the crowd.

And then the hammer caught him across the teeth. So there were no roles tonight, after all. No face shots, Benny warned everyone beforehand.

"Come here, you disgusting lizard boy," Thor said, smiling, and in a second it was too much, hit him like a toxin, that phrase, that phrase he'd never told to anybody before last night, before he'd met his new friend.

"Come and get it you disgusting lizard boy."

But Croc had broken his wrist with one grasp, the hammer dropped to the floor. He began pummeling this fake Thor, moving up his rib cage as if it were a ladder.

* * *

"I learned later that the department was facing some heat for not being able to arrest anybody for a string of bank robberies back then. Somebody was tearing off vault doors like they were taffy," the creature said, as if reminiscing about a happy childhood.

"Didn't three security guards lose their lives?" The biographer asked, wandering also about the reporter's story, about what truth was sometimes encased in lies.

"I wouldn't know about that," Croc said. "And besides, they had no evidence. So Gordon let his pet bat out for a little sting, I guess. Bat had a little word with Thor to set me off. Batman, with all his rules, wasn't above playing dirty. I guess those rules, that mask of decency, came later. Those ribs cost me a year each. They had me cold on attempted murder, Gordon's consolation prize. He earned a reputation for justice and I for being an unthinking savage. But emotion is not stupidity."

It occurred to the biographer that the crocodile must've obsessed over subsequent media descriptions of himself, though the one reporter who actually knew him he never got to read.

"What did he look like, this reporter, Batman unmasked?"

"He was heavily disguised and I hear he has plastic surgery every few years anyway. I spent years hunting him after I escaped, but all I could ever find was Batman and only by committing crimes, luring him to the sewers."

The biographer might've been moved, might've felt something for this man who seemed to obsess over the creature to which he was most commonly compared, if his own predicament had not been far worse. He moved to leave, the entire interview possibly a waste.

"You wanted revenge?"

"I don't know what I wanted. He cried crocodile tears for me, but so what? No one had ever cried for me before. And no one has since."

* * *

GOTHAM HERALD City Notes: Waylon Jones AKA Killer Croc transferred to Stonegate Prison

"I spoke to him myself," ADA Sherwood Tawney was quoted as saying. "Whatever he may look like, he's no less sane than you or I." But Gotham insiders said the transaction came about only because Stone Gate's warden owed high-powered lawyer Vincent Vertas. Tawney had no comment about reports that a special cell is being built for "Killer Croc" to segregate him from the prison population.


	3. catching up

**III: catching up**

The biographer braced himself for a monster, like everyone he'd seen the pictures, but what he saw that day in Arkham was just a coinless, friendless man.

He seemed shrunken somehow and yet overweight. Some small flame in him had been extinguished, that was what disturbed him most, not the gruesome half-wreckage of his face.

It was Harvey's voice that retrieved for the biographer their older, shared reality. The same wounded tone, always laden with emotion. The way he could make some stick up man seem like the Son of Sam.

"Hello, Vincent," the voice said.

Once friends, close, very close even, in law school, the two ambitious young men eventually drifted to opposing sides of the justice system, friendship turning into rivalry, respect souring into disdain.

The same voice that had once called him a defender of scum, a whore, scum himself. He had keyed three of the biographer's cars, long angry gashes. That famous temper.

Harvey had always been theatrical, the scarred silver dollar originally a courtroom prop for closing statements, signifying the shitty luck of victimhood.

Now tourists bought replicas in little shops.

"I know why you're here," the former district attorney said, half of his face angled into shadow. "I have something to tell you."

But the biographer knew better. Harvey just liked to hear himself talk, always had.

* * *

The bandages had come off slowly, one layer at a time. There were many, many disclaimers, talk of swelling, healing, the therapeutic passage of time, there was a note from Harvey's friend the mayor.

At last a nurse gave him a mirror.

His scream was so horrifying doctors on other floors wondered who had died. Harvey bashed his face into his reflection, the glass fracturing into shards. He started sawing at his wrists before an army of orderlies subdued him with 80 ccs of lupenol and a few tons of muscle.

In those early days, before he embraced who he had become, before he became ruled by his own violence, flexing his muscles into Gotham's underworld, a silk cloth covered the scarred side of his face. The silk a small vestige of Harvey, known for his expensive taste, all the suits.

He set up in a dingy abandoned theatre on some outskirt of Gotham. It was just him and Oslo then, a mugger. That was one thing about being a prosecutor, you knew a lot of criminals.

It was a little like a trial, what they did, the casting sessions. He just wanted things to be the way they used to be.

The women, all blondes, were told they were being considered for a role.

Questions arrived via index card from off-stage, Oslo ferrying them back and forth, reading them out loud.

_Hobbies?_

_Interests?_

_Do you play the violin?_

The women were between 5 foot 4 and 5 foot 6, all others turned away.

_Do you like California reds?_

He was going to find a new Grace one way or another. She might be half as good, but so was he.

_I've done ballet since I was little._

_No!_ he growled from off-stage.

What was the rush? The hands of his clock moved by audition, not days. It was a way to go on.

After the interview period, the more promising girls would be asked to recite a single sentence.

_You'll be there, won't you?_

The next notecard was always the same.

_Again_.

The auditions went on fruitlessly. Rumors spread in Gotham of a reclusive director, foreign perhaps, mysterious and short-tempered, an artistic genius, they assumed. Brunettes dyed their hair.

_Again._

But then one day, there she was. Grace.

Harvey came out of the shadows, banishing Oslo with a word, the actresses sent home without explanation. That Batman was there too, Harvey barely registered, the odd mathematics of it.

Grace.

Harvey Dent trembled.

She whispered things, it was hard to speak. She was sorry she hadn't been there when he'd woken up, she had been in a coma herself. She'd been looking everywhere for him. Everyone had. Where had Harvey gone? The mayor, his friend Bruce, the tabloids, everyone wanted to know. No one more than she.

She asked to see his face, asked him to remove his mask.

He did it, no coin, no nothing. But when it was off, when he let himself be seen, all she could say was sorry. I'm so sorry, she said.

She fled, crying. Two-Face found Oslo, poor Oslo, and blew his brains out.

Batman stood in the audience. _Harvey_, he kept pleading.

That meddling scoundrel had brought her before she was ready.

There would be no more auditions.

* * *

He moved his face fully into the light, the deep stitched grooves worm-like, his skin a sickly, yellowish pallor, and that oversized inhuman eye.

"She's out there still. Vomiting at the thought of me. She wasn't ready."

"But Grace didn't survive the explosion," Vincent said, knowing full well how Harvey reacted when contradicted, wanting only to assuage his pain. "She never woke up. You know that. She loved you."

He pulled up the obituary on his phone.

"You think you can slip doctored evidence by me?" Harvey paused to yell for the guard. "The world is colder than you can understand. Love, it runs out."

When the guard arrived, the biographer stood immediately to go, sensing the Harvey in this creature across from him slip away. But it was not to the biographer that the guard addressed himself. "Six minutes is the best I can do," he told Two-Face, before unlocking his handcuffs. Something passed between their hands.

The biographer began to shake, not in fear but in absolute loneliness, the way both of their worlds had fallen apart, the way it had come to this.

Two-Face flipped his coin.

Something animal took over, something mean.

"You're going to tell _me _about Grace? You think you know better?"

Even the right side of his face became distorted. Mumbling became incoherent ranting, an opening statement of sorts, about things from years and years before, old cases, some thugs the biographer had sprung, people the biographer had not thought about in a long time.

"How's Kati doing?" Two-Face sneered, closer now, his bulging yellow eye centimeters away from the biographer.

Intended to bring pain, his wife's name brought the biographer joy. Two-Face knew! He knew about what had happened to Kati, to his children, their kidnapping, the strange ransom. _I know why you're here_. He'd told his story for a reason, he'd provided some clue. Even though the biographer would lose several of his teeth, his jaw cracked, his body riddled with contusions, even though he'd be hospitalized, he almost smiled at this man who was still his friend.

* * *

GOTHAM HERALD: City Officials Deny Existence of "Dent Day" Practice

A spokesman for the Gotham District Attorney's office again denied rumors that the city occasionally uses physical force to "persuade" suspects to confess. The practice is named after former District Attorney Harvey Dent, now known as Two-Face, perhaps the greatest trial lawyer the city had ever seen. After mob boss Carmine Falcone's boys rigged up Den't house with dynamite, retiring the District Attorney and ruining half of his face, certain nasty accusations were made, sullying a once spotless reputation. Among them were stories that when Dent would be frustrated, he'd personally go into cells. "Therapy," he was said to have called it.


	4. a forgery, PART I

**IV: a forgery, PART I**

All the foam had been clawed out of the couch cushions. Her cat, probably. The biographer had expected luxury, the spoils of Selina's most notorious talent. Rubies, diamonds, paintings as big as she could carry. But the apartment was tiny, a single room crowded by portraits along the walls, the one aspect of his imagination that corresponded to reality. Massive works, some of which, improbably, he recognized.

"All forgeries, of course," said the woman dressed entirely in black.

He'd read up on Selina Kyle, the former cat burglar. Always looking to take things, not always physical things, that's where you had to be careful. Even in Arkham, she'd been full of petty schemes, managing somehow to swindle other inmates of privileges or secrets or prides. He'd done several supplemental interviews to prepare for this one, since it would be in the wild, as it were. It was useful to keep busy, to not think about the other things, his family.

"Not quite myself these days," she said, extending a leg from beneath black silk.

He grimaced at the odd craters in her thigh, the skin dipping inward, all the irregularities more stark in contrast to her beauty. The biographer knew from her file and a former guard that she'd never really recovered from the shattering of her femur. She'd starved herself so thin she squeezed through Arkham's bars, but when she had to jump from a wall fifty feet high, her body couldn't withstand the force. She'd had to lay there and beg a guard to drag her back to the infirmary. But the guard just threw her into the cell without pain relievers or treatment of any kind, her leg left mangled. It had never properly healed.

She kept applying something that looked like makeup to her face, as though one thing could compensate for another.

Eventually, the parole board let her out. She could barely walk so what could she really steal?

At a second glance, he noticed that most of the paintings were torn in places, covered in frenzied scratch marks. Across from him, sunken into the skeletal sofa, Selina petted her cat Isis, soothing some small feline worry, or one of her own.

It had been three months exactly since the biographer had been alone with a woman. He hadn't been able to stay in his wifeless, childless house, so he'd been living out of a hotel. In spite of the general strangeness of meeting a woman who'd once worn a costume and stolen from people like him, he was happy for her company.

She told him about the years of cat and mouse, she and Batman, the long flirtation, a game, on rooftops, in alleyways, sometimes on the same side, sometimes not. He'd saved her life, but she'd saved his too.

For a long time, she said, the nights were her days.

On the telephone, the biographer had asked for an interview, had let her assume he belonged to some obscure periodical. She hadn't probed at all, had told him to come anytime.

"When I lived closer to Gotham Park, she continued, Batman made sure my apartment was along his nightly patrol—to keep an eye on me or—who can say?"

She smiled, a rehearsed beat in a story she'd told many times. Or maybe the thought truly brought her happiness, he didn't know.

"Look, Vincent" — how did she know his name? — "since you're here, and since I don't often have have guests, I'll tell you how our story ended, how different my life could've been."

"I followed him home once late at night and saw where he lived. I presented myself to him, thinking it could be our secret. A life together. The next day, I woke up on the side of a road with bruises up my arms. Didn't remember a thing. He told me what happened later, as a kind of apology. He said I couldn't jeopardize his work."

"His work," she repeated, caught on the word, gesturing facetiously to a faux-Rembrandt behind her.

"But that's probably not what happened. Our game must've felt over to him. All of a sudden, it's merely Selena Kyle who is standing in his house. Catwoman, just a costume discarded on the floor. Just me. Who am I without the game? A young woman who could one day work a corporate job? Who could try real hard to get by?"

She rubbed her arms, left hand consoling right, right left. He'd read this story before, though, in a series online, a Batman messageboard of sorts he'd come across in his research. The post containing a version of her story had received thousands of upvotes, for its content or suspected veracity. The author was anonymous, the story nearly identical, line for line, only small differences, one month was three, arms instead of neck.

* * *

"I loved him, can you believe that?" said Selina.

To the biographer, it was as though she'd said, _Look at us, two people who've lost everything._

Two people who could not be anymore who they were.

"I heard what happened," Selina said very quietly.

She moved closer, her eyes so dark.

She leant into him slightly as though they were going to slow dance, let her lips lie across his, held them there until he kissed her.

It had been only three months but each day had felt like a lifetime, any shred of affection since appearing as a whole bouquet of emotion. He'd been absolutely alone, waiting for nothing except the strange correspondence that sometimes came in the mail.

_Who's the bat? Who? Whoowhoo_

_Who came first, the bat or the chicken? _

_VinnyBoy 1says hello! So does VinnyBoy 2!_

He drew back from her in horror, sobbing, his tiny infidelity. It hadn't occurred to him that he still had something to lose.

She seemed satisfied, as though an equation had been balanced. Freer now. "You know, even if you find her, she won't just run back into your arms, she won't be the same. She won't be the woman you remember. She'll be smaller, shrunken, closed. She'll blame you."

He knew then that Selina had written the story, that it had come from her, though its truth he doubted, a chapter read without its book a special kind of lie.

"All forgeries, huh," he said, to change the subject, emboldened by his own insight. He had to act, he had to carve out some hope.

"How would you like the real thing?" he asked, indicating a picture of a darkened street, an older Gotham.

Marvin could do with one less painting, he knew. His old friend, the curator of The Gotham House of Art. Did he even appreciate what he had? Always away at some gala. So many paintings stacked up in his mansion by the park.

"It's a perfect forgery," she replied, though they both knew it wasn't, a certain hard limit in the artist, even the best of her underworld acquaintances.

He responded with only silence, let her longing take a shape. Let her crave what she doesn't have, in all its forms. A lawyer, he had long known how to whittle sticks to look like carrots.

"I haven't seen him for years, you know," Selina said.

For a second, he thought she was talking about Marvin, that she somehow had already intuited his plan. But then he realized she was still thinking about Batman, the road in her mind unforked.

"I can get you that painting," the biographer said.

Marvin fancied himself a sort of renaissance man, a man who though he owned treasures, he didn't really need any locks. Marvin's friends all knew the door code. It was an informal salon, his house, a center of culture.

"What do you expect in exchange?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.

"The real story."

* * *

GOTHAM HERALD: Selina Kyle aka Catwoman spotted buying groceries at DiNikolos

The stunning ex-con was spotted on 39th and 1st gathering some vegetables. "I almost didn't recognize her," our spy confided. "But she told the counterman her name to place an order, then it hit me!" The woman once known for her exploits as Catwoman was seen limping out of the store by herself. But not before she paid for her groceries, our spy confirmed.


	5. a forgery, PART II

**V: a forgery, PART II **

He'd done as he promised and gotten them into the mansion. He'd had to help her through the streets, a human crutch.

Then Selena's nail was like a blade against his throat.

"He can keep the painting," she said, as she triggered the silent alarm. Even in the dark, the biographer could see her smiling. A reunion with Batman. Like the old days, when her crimes were a kind of personal bat signal. She began to reminisce. She grew up very poor, she said, with nothing. Her only possessions scraps of jewelry she sometimes saw in the street, wearing them like she was a queen. Later, she learned she could sell herself to men who wanted her, could make good money too.

They'd met after an overly aggressive customer wouldn't leave her alone. Batman had saved her, thought she was some silly damsel in distress. "Stay out of the alleys," he cautioned her, and even though it was obvious advice, something about the way he said it felt very, very genuine, she remembered. Even now, she wasn't sure why it had stuck with her. She couldn't quite remember.

She'd listened but not exactly. She'd worked her way out of the alleys, into one apartment and then another. She could get more and give so much less.

As she spoke, the biographer didn't know if he was a hostage or a witness.

She'd expected her rival, her lover, to at least visit once she'd been released from Arkham, to at least check on her. But the only person who visited was Roland Daggett, the sleazy chemical manufacturer she'd once helped Batman lock away for spreading a virus in Gotham. He was the developer of the Renew-U cream that could change appearances, that was a kind of faux-skin. The cream that had created Clay-Face. Once a man who soothed wrinkles, who administered Botox, later Daggett was a surgeon in a jar. But Renew-U had been banned after the disaster with Clayface, who'd once been a charming actor named Matt Hagan. Still, he said he could get it for her if she'd try his newest creation. If she'd be his guinea pig, he'd help fix her leg, rebuild the muscle, the bone. Get her out of her apartment, a homemade cell.

"Whatever it was, I started forgetting things. But he wouldn't give me the Renew-U unless I took more and more."

Selina had long since released the biographer's throat.

"I knew it was a kind of revenge, but I didn't care. There were things I wanted to forget. You see, it's true I knew who Batman was. But I think that's why he didn't visit me. I took something I couldn't give back. I think that's why I was caught in the first place. With his help. His secret locked up in Arkham. So, I decided to forget it. Let things go back to how they were before I spoiled everything."

The biographer could hear sirens, and then Selina crying. It didn't appear as though Batman was coming.

She began slathering herself in handfulls of the cream. The biographer knew his time was running out.

"Please. Do you remember anything about him?"

"Stay out of the alley. Stay out!" she shouted, like she'd gone insane.

Someone pounded on the door.

"He came," Selina said, dropping Daggett's container.

The biographer panicked. Could it be? If it was Batman, he was too close, the biographer a sniper forced into hand to hand combat. What was it one of the very first notes had said? _If you go to the bat, if you give up that easily, I'll take their thumbs. You want bats? You'll get little wings for your kiddies. _

But it was a police officer who walked through the door.

The biographer always thought of himself on the "right" side but he had to admit he was now in a shapeless thing. He cycled through stories, excuses.

Was he her defense attorney, trying to reason with her?

Housesitting for his friend?

A good samaritan who saw her from the street?

Was he just himself?

He thought of his children, of fingerless hands, of how useless to them he'd be in a cell. Selina was at the door, her brain soft with cream.

"Well, well. If it isn't Catwoman," said the officer, turning on the lights. "Up to your old tricks, I see."

The biographer spoke. "I'm Vincent Vertas, a friend of Marvin. This is his house. I caught Ms. Kyle trying to get her hands on the art."

She sat down, as if transfixed by the large paintings along the wall.

The officer placed a hand on her inner thigh. "From what I understand, you used to turn other tricks, too."

"Why didn't he come?" Selina asked plaintively, to no one in particular.

"I'll close up shop here," the biographer said, as the officer took her away.

Furious, he rubbed the cream into his temples, all that was left. He'd learned nothing about Batman, certainly nothing he needed to remember, least of all what he'd done.

When he woke up, he was sitting beside the painting of Gotham he'd originally intended to take. Where was Selina? The painting was massacred with scratch marks, as if some lunatic had tried to get inside, revisiting some obscure past.

* * *

GOTHAM HERALD: Catwoman Uses Up Ninth Life

Selina Kyle AKA Catwoman has been recommitted to Arkham after a psychotic episode. She can barely even remember her own name, a source inside the mental institution told the Herald. Kyle was arrested after a botched robbery inside the home of Marvin Atsby, curator of the Gotham House of Art. A friend of Atsby triggered the silent alarm, saving all but one of the paintings.


End file.
